2/2 In recovering her strategies of power, we also recover women’s place in the making of imperial history.
More soon!

1/2 First book proofs!
Women, Gardens, and Agency in Imperial Russia is finally becoming real.
This project asks us to look beyond sovereigns and recognise how a non-regnant consort like Maria Feodorovna used gardens to intervene in politics.

2/2 This work glows with emerald and yellow; it’s so striking, I want to put together an outfit in those shades. The green? A pigment banned in 1900 for its arsenic. Toxic but irresistible.

1/2 Bessie Davidson is another artist who stood out. Forgotten in Australia (she never returned), she made her mark in France with luminous interiors. As a feminist, she elevated overlooked spaces like nurseries and domestic interiors as part of the fight for equality.

This is such a fascinating story! What a tragic waste of a talent.

7/
My favourite work? Portrait of Madame Sze, painted in London. Cool blue tones create a soft, melancholic atmosphere, drawing the eye to Madame’s delicate, porcelain-like features. It’s breathtaking.

6/
In Europe, she succeeded. Justine exhibited her works at the Royal Academy in London and at the Paris Salon. Her style was subtle, precise, and deeply emotive.

5/
This miniature portrait shows one of the children she cared for, painted just before her departure for Europe. She was 43. She had saved up for this voyage her whole life. The self-belief that took!

4/
Living in an increasingly nationalistic Australia as a woman of mixed heritage, Justine supported herself by working as a governess. She studied art in her spare time, quietly building a future that no one had scripted for her.

3/ Justine Kong Sing was born in 1868 in northern New South Wales, the daughter of a Chinese miner and merchant. She had little money, but a lot of determination to become a professional artist. Imagine the odds she was up against.

2/
The exhibition focuses on Australian and New Zealand women who worked in Europe between the late 19th century and the start of WWII. Over the next few days, I’ll be sharing short threads on the artists who moved me most. First up: Justine Kong Sing.

1/
I recently visited the Dangerously Modern exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW, and I was completely blown away. So many fascinating women artists were uncovered during its preparation, their stories largely forgotten until now.

8/8 This much-needed book challenges reductive narratives and reframes the role of women artists under Catherine the Great. It marks an important step in building a feminist art history of the Russian Empire.

7/8 Equally telling is the near-total absence of Russian-born women artists. Structural barriers kept them from emerging, leaving the spotlight on foreign-born women—much like Catherine herself.

6/8 Her answer is interesting: Catherine II did not consciously promote women artists. She acquired works recommended by male advisors, reinforcing their gendered biases. As a result, her collection of women’s art was incidental, not deliberate.

5/8 Blakesley’s book pushes back. She gives nuanced biographies of women artists commissioned in Russia in the later eighteenth century and asks: what difference did having a female ruler make for women’s careers?

4/8 That oversimplification shows a wider problem: women artists’ work is too often explained through their relationships with men, patrons, mentors, or family, rather than recognised for their own expertise and agency.

3/8 Twenty years ago, at the Russian Museum, I heard the sculptor Marie-Anne Collot reduced to a romantic anecdote: her model of Peter I’s head supposedly had heart-shaped pupils because she was in love with her mentor, Étienne-Maurice Falconet.

2/8 A vital step toward a feminist art history of the Russian Empire, it highlights women’s contributions that remain too often undervalued.

1/8 Excited to share my review of Rosalind Blakesley’s "Women Artists in the Reign of Catherine the Great" in the latest issue of Slavonic & East European Review. Link - muse.jhu.edu/pub/427/arti...

Thank you for your interest! My collaborator Dr Emma Gleadhill will present the results of our project next year at the Johnston collection in Melbourne.

My copy of "Napoleonic Objects and Their Afterlives" has arrived! My chapter with Emma Gleadhill follows the Napoleonic collection Dame Mabel Brookes assembled in the early 20th century, now quietly housed in the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery.

Call for Papers - Voltaire in the Baltic World: Circulations, Receptions, Legacies 5-6 March 2026, University of Tartu, Estonia In connection with an upcoming exhibition on Voltaire at the University of Tartu’s Museum of Art, and in collaboration with the Voltaire Foundation…

Call for Papers – Voltaire in the Baltic World: Circulations, Receptions, Legacies

Our colleague Sophie Turner is organising this exciting conference in Tarttu, Estonia, next year, which the Voltaire Foundation is supporting.

www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/news-item/ca...

8/ This pot was named the “Devonshire Garden Pot” in honour of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
Stylish, influential, and politically engaged, she was also great for marketing.

7/ The anti-slavery medallions were among the most powerful objects on display.
Produced in the late 18th century, they were distributed freely and worn as pins or hairpieces.
“Am I not a man and a brother?” Early abolitionist design at its most effective.

6/ A fun moment of design recycling:
One plaque celebrates the First Fleet's arrival in Australia.
Just two years later, the same visual was reused to commemorate the French Revolution.
Same layout — very different message!

5/ This neoclassical pot was designed by Lady Elizabeth Templetown, one of several aristocratic women who collaborated with Wedgwood.
Her designs celebrate domestic virtue: sewing, spinning, and graceful calm.

4/ Every item in the set features a frog, at Catherine’s request.
The palace was to be built on land called “Kekerekeksinen,” or “Frog Marsh” in Finnish.
She loved the name so much that she embraced the frog as a motif.

3/ These two plates from the Green Frog Service really got me.
Catherine the Great had 952 pieces made, with over 1200 British landscape scenes.
I study her, so seeing them in person felt emotional, like bumping into an old friend in an unexpected place.

2/ This pineapple-shaped tea canister (1760s) was a delight!
In the 18th century, pineapples were so rare and prestigious that people rented them as dinner table centrepieces.
Naturally, Wedgwood turned the trend into high-end ceramic design.